Monumental – Skiing Our National Parks | Powder

A Monumental Project

Monumental was a campaign project for Powder Magazine that focused on skiing in five of the United States’ National Parks in tribute to the 100 Year Anniversary of the park system. The editors at Powder chose to highlight – Yosemite, Glacier, Grand Teton, Yellowstone, and Olympic National Parks. Powder’s goal was to create an online digital feature, hardcover book, film, and film tour for the project.

KGB Productions, a film production house here in Jackson, Wyoming, produced the film. Powder assigned different photographers and athletes to each destination of the project. Jay was responsible for photographing the segment within Glacier National Park in Montana.

The Project Intro

“Recently we sent teams, led by KGB Productions, to five national parks — Yosemite, Glacier, Grand Teton, Yellowstone, and Olympic — to document their experiences. What they found casts these parks in a light rarely seen by anything not using four legs or wings. They, along with the writers we enlisted to document their own journeys in these pages, often traveled long distances across rugged terrain, accessing places that still exist much as they have for thousands of years.” – Matt Hansen, Monumental Online Digital Feature Introduction.

Logistics

Hiking into Glacier National Park required each person carrying upwards of 80 pounds of gear on their backs, while first walking, then skiing a total of almost ten miles into the interior of the park. Temperatures rose to over 80 degrees on the valley floor the week of the trip, turning all of the snow to moisture laden slop in early May.

This type of scenario was almost unheard of a decade ago. Scientists are predicting that Glacier National Park will lose all of its glaciers by 2030. That means the 150 glaciers present in the park in 1850 when the area was first surveyed, will be nothing more than barren scars of rock and dirt.

While the environment in Glacier produced some of the hardest working conditions to date for Jay, the vast wildness of the location inspired him to produce some of his strongest ski photos of his career. You can see a selection of Jay’s favorite photos from Monumental on the corresponding portfolio page on this site as well as the final publication tear sheets below.